That doesn't mean significant pieces of the airplane aren't still intact. For example, the landing gear and the engines are the heaviest and most structurally dense part of any airplane, and those are almost certainly still intact units. Further, since a few fairly good-sized pieces have already been recovered from washing ashore in a few places, it's likely the airplane hit the water at a somewhat shallow angle, which would probably mean there are large-ish sections of the fuselage that remained mostly intact. Given the challenging nature of that area of the Indian ocean floor, they'd have to be practically right on top of the debris field to find anything, but if they do get lucky, I imagine there are good-sized pieces to be found.

Except this object is not traveling in a straight line in a 2D plane. Orbital mechanics. Change the velocity and you change the orbit. Your "homework assignment" is far too simple for the situation at hand.

That makes the assumption that super-intelligent AI has curiosity and an exploratory motive built into it. If someone were dumb enough to create a WOPR and give it the nuclear launch codes and then in a fit of madness instruct it to wipe out humanity because humans are a plague on the earth, and it duly followed its instructions, where would be its motivation to send out a Von Neumann probe after the humans were gone? In fact, a super-intelligent AI might (quite rightly) conclude that since a biological intelligent creature such as humans were the cause of such a dire natural threat to the well-being of the planet and its other inhabitants, it would be best to stay away from other biological intelligence. While I suppose it might conclude that since the solar system has a finite lifespan, it might be reasonable to seek out younger inhabitation somewhere else in the galaxy before its home star pooped out (assuming it were programmed with some sort of self-preservation in the first place...it might not even care, so to speak), its probes might actively avoid any signs of biological intelligent life because biology is just too much trouble to want to deal with.

Yes, that is indeed what I mean.

However, as a counterpoint argument, abiogenesis on earth seems to have occurred practically instantaneously, once the geologic situation calmed down enough from the planet's formation. The almost immediate emergence of life once conditions became favorable argues that it isn't as low a probability event as you might imagine.

"the debris may have fallen as it re-entered"

Gee, ya think?

(Dateline 2245) SpaceX demonstrates the first application of an operational Alcubierre drive with a quick round trip to Proxima Centauri. Also, from NASA today: "We believe an unmanned test flight of the SLS to orbit the moon could possibly take place this year. We think we finally have that valve problem fixed."

For the same reason archaeologists try to recreate Cleopatra's perfum: it's an interesting, mind-engaging exercise in a field of study someone enjoys. To ask why anyone would do this is to question the personal joy anyone gets out of a hobby. Sometimes whatever you're doing is just fun, whether it has a point to it or not.

I'd call it more compensating for an undesirable behavior rather than masking it. That's hardly stupid, unless you want to call a yaw damper stupid and invalidate about 60 years of aircraft design.

There are lots of automated systems in any modern transport jet that are there to compensate for undesirable tendencies in certain flight conditions. The stupid thing Boeing did here was the way they implemented MCAS, relying on the single point of failure you mentioned, making it far too easy to fail, as well as providing no readily apparent warning to the pilot.

We adjust the airspeed to account for winds all the time. Yes, in a strong tailwind, the flight will be planned with a slower airspeed to let the wind help you along, and it does save a lot of gas.

However, pilots are humans, and we like breaking records just like the next guy. I imagine the conversation between dispatch and the crew that day when they showed up for the flight went something like:

Dispatch: "Hey, Captain, we've run the numbers, and you have one hell of a jet stream on the Charlie track tonight. You've got a good shot at breaking the JFK-LHR speed record. Want to go for it?"

Captain: "Awesome, put an extra 20,000 pounds gas on the flight and plan it for Mach 0.88!"

This just continues to show your ignorance about the subject. MCAS doesn't make a shallow stall deeper, it is there to prevent a stall from becoming worse by biasing the nose down, which helps to put the airplane in an attitude that helps to recover from the stall, so it makes any stall shallower, not deeper. Again, no different from what a yaw damper does to overcome the tendency of any swept wing airplane to Dutch roll at high altitudes and high speeds. Or what the elevator feel differential is doing to artificially maintain a consistent feel to the pilot throughout the airplane's full range of speed. Etc, etc, etc. Modern jet aircraft are full of these little systems that aid the pilot in flying what would otherwise be an airplane that would be difficult to smoothly control during certain flight regimes.

Everything on an airplane has to go through a certification process by the FAA to determine reliability, etc. Then you have liability issues to factor in. The cockpit displays are obviously safety-critical components that have to work all the time. I have no idea what their tech specs are, but theyâ(TM)re pretty good displays, especially considering that they were initially designed back in the late 80s/early 90s (the displays on the 737 NG are the same ones used in the 777). They donâ(TM)t wash out in direct sunlight, they have what appears to me to be a really high contrast ratio, Iâ(TM)ve never experienced a full failure of one or even see. so much as a single dead pixel, so Iâ(TM)m thinking these things are a bit more robust than your typical LCD in your TV or laptop. Kind of like the difference between a typical computer display vs a media reference monitor. Aside from the development and ongoing manufacturing costs, though, clearly some of that price has to do with there only being a single certified source for it. An airline certainly canâ(TM)t just run down to Best Buy and grab a monitor off the shelf and call it good. The clocks in an instrument panel on something like a 757 or a 737 function as clocks, timers, elapsed time counters, and receive time data from GPS, and are part of the data network with the flight management computers, so yeah, theyâ(TM)re a bit more than just plain old clocks, but I was still surprised back then to see that price tag.

This does, however, go to show how little you personally understand about aerodynamics or aviation engineering. There hasn't been a transport category aircraft designed in the last 60 or 70 years that hasn't had some kind of intervention between the pilot and the actual control surfaces to artificially make it stable throughout its planned envelope. MCAS is inherently no different from a yaw damper.

Given that about 20 years ago I saw a maintenance ticket on an instrument panel clock on a 757 that listed the replacement cost to the major airline I fly for as $5,000 (yes, a clock), I'm going to go out on a limb and say an AOA vane for a 737 is a bit more than a few hundred dollars. The display units on the instrument panel (very high-quality ~8 in x 8 in LCDs that display flight instrumentation, navigation, and engine data; on the 737 NG there are 6 of these, on the Max there are 4, but those 4 are much larger) can cost close to a cool hundred grand each.

As the saying goes, if it flies or floats, rent it!

I see. Yes, those switches are relabeled on the Max, but that wasn't really because of MCAS. There are two kinds of stab trim on the 737, a slow trim that the autopilot uses, and a fast trim that the yoke switches activate. MCAS uses the fast trim function.

On the older 737s, the stab trim cutout switch labeled Autopilot would shut off the slow trim function, and the switch labeled Main Electric just shut the whole thing off. But here's the thing: a runaway stab trim is a serious emergency (for reasons that have been made abundantly clear by recent events), and so if there is a runaway trim, even if it's just the autopilot slow trim, no one is going to fool around with just turning off the slow trim function and leaving any part of the trim motor active. There's only one stab trim motor, and something went wrong with it. Without knowing exactly what went wrong and what might go wrong with that motor next, both those switches are going off and staying off.

With the Max, Boeing just bowed to reality and changed the labeling of those switches, and (and this gets back to that common type rating thing) both switches actually now do exactly the same thing. Effectively, Boeing removed the Autopilot trim cutout switch. They could have just taken the switch off entirely, but they left two switches there, either of which will remove power from the entire electric stab trim motor. They did that both for redundancy (if one switch fails to shut off a runaway, the other one is your backup plan), and also just to keep the cockpit switches and controls looking as similar as possible to the older airplanes for that all-important common type rating.

Any kind of stab trim motor malfunction is going to have the pilots turn both of those switches off; it's been that way in Boeing cockpits based on this design stretching back to at least the 1960s. Those switches might as well be ganged together. The fact that there are two is just a holdover from ancient Boeing days of the 707 and 727. There are a lot of little bits of cockpit design that have arcane origins in airplanes from bygone eras.